


"What's 'bogey' in French?"

by LizCarroll2612



Series: Holmes-Watson-Family [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Could Be Canon, Family, Gen, Mycroft Being Mycroft, Mycroft speaks A LOT OF languages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:50:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4957483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizCarroll2612/pseuds/LizCarroll2612
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft baby-sitting the Watson-girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"What's 'bogey' in French?"

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, if you've read my other Holmes-Watson-Family stories you know about Rose's and Ellie's family situation but you can also consider this to be a different universe where Sherlock is just their very engaged Godfather and Mycroft gets drawn into it because of that. So I thought the "Could be canon"-tag is justified.

Mycroft Holmes had never thought about if he was good with kids or if he liked them.  
He knew he was good with people in general - meaning that he was usually very good in knowing what they were up to and in manipulating them to believe they wanted what he wanted (that was why he was so good in his job) - and that he absolutely didn't like people in general - which in his opinion in no way contradicted being good with people in general.  
But kids had just never been something within his realm of experience, so the question had never come up.

Since a few years now of course there were Rose and Ellie Watson who considering his brother's involvement with the Watson-Family now also were a part of his life.  
Strangely enough he actually found several things to connect over with both girls so all in all they were a surprisingly interesting or maybe even pleasant addition to his realm of experience.

Nonetheless he felt slightly out of place sitting on a bench on a playground with one schoolbag and one preschool backpack beside him with two girls in school uniforms sitting at his feet baking sand cake.  
The times he had ended up here before when he had agreed to collect the children (which didn't happen very often at all) he had wondered if he would feel less out of place if he would dress more casually but he knew from experience that for him it felt just wrong in general if he would dress differently than he usually did. Just the thought of wearing jeans and a T-shirt like the other men who were here with their kids made him feel like his toenails rolled up.

After a while Rose and Ellie started the favourite game that was only really fun with Uncle Mycroft.

"What's horse in French?  
"Cheval"  
"What's horse in Hebrew?"  
״סוס״  
(Soos)  
"What's horse in Swedish?"  
"Häst"  
"What's horse in German?"  
"Pferd"  
"What's horse in Finnish?"  
"Hevonen"  
What's horse in Latin?"  
"Equus"  
A few minutes and 21 languages later even Mycroft's repertoire was up and they started a new round.

"What's biscuit in French?"  
"Biscuit"  
"What's biscuit in Hebrew?"  
״עוגיה״  
(Oogia)  
Mycroft was used to people thinking he had weird interests so he didn't care much for the looks he got from the other parents. Mary had had a serious talk with him about not influencing her children to become even more unusual than they already were but this was not his doing. They had come up with this and they liked it. And if some of the vocabulary took hold in their heads for later use it certainly wouldn't hurt.

"What's tree in French?"  
"Arbre"  
"What's tree in Hebrew?"  
״עץ״  
(Etz)  
A little boy stood beside them and had started to listen. He had his forefinger buried deeply inside his nose.  
"What's tree in Swedish?"  
"Träd"  
"What's tree in German?"  
"Baum"  
When another round was finished Rose looked around to get another idea.  
The boy standing beside them had been successful with his work and pulled his finger out of his nose. He took a good look at what he had found before licking it off his finger.

"What's bogey in French?" Rose asked enthusiastically.  
Mycroft stared at her.  
"Err..." he said going through all of the languages in his head and not finding "bogey" in the vocabulary saved in his head for any of them.  
It took a lot of time to get together the translation for bogey with the aid of some online-dictionaries and his smartphone for most of the languages Rose and Ellie required.  
It was pretty easy to find what he needed for German, French, Russian, Spanish and the like, he searched longer for among others Hebrew, Finnish and Vietnamese and finally gave up on Standard Malay and Navajo after a while.

Sherlock felt like he hadn't felt since he had beaten his brother in RoboRally twice in a row (when they were 15 and 22 - Mycroft had never again agreed to play it after that), when Rose and Ellie told him that Uncle Mycroft wasn't as smart as they had always thought afterall.

**Author's Note:**

> My kids like to play this game (we can do it with 5-6 languages - not that I speak all of them, but I know the basic or very basic vocabulary) and I always wanted to write a story like this because since Sherlock and Mycroft talked about how Mycroft learned Serbian I always thought how great it must be to play this with Mycroft.
> 
> I wrote this story now to come to terms with the shocking realisation that you can live in a country and speak it's language for years or can have written scientific articles in a language but still fail at one of the most common children's words: bogey! (Yes, even for English I had to look this up... I learned that in American it's booger and in British English bogey - I hope dict.cc is right about that?)
> 
> I asked around among my colleagues who teach foreign languages (and so of course studied the language at university and lived in a country where the language is spoken for a while) and none of them knew bogey in "their" foreign language except for one guy whose wife is French and who raise their children in both languages. But he admitted that he also only learned it recently when his son started talking.  
> I have to admit I felt really relieved.


End file.
